Vermont model leads the way in management of national forests

Mar. 11, 2012

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Chris Casey, a forest silviculturist with the U.S. Forest Service, walks to a new bottomless pipe arch culvert installed in the Green Mountain National Forest in Ripton on Tuesday Feb. 21, 2012. / EMILY McMANAMY, Free Press

Gary Smith loads freshly cut trees into his truck that he logged under an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service in the Green Mountain National Forest on Tuesday Feb. 21, 2012. / EMILY McMANAMY / Free Press

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RIPTON — Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest at its most basic level is just a bunch of trees, hills, rocks and brooks. To manage the forest, you’d think National Forest Service employees would just let the trees grow and pretty much leave the rocks and hills alone.

That is until you start to consider the health and wide variety of trees in the forest. And the animals, birds and smaller plants. Then think about all the hikers, photographers, bird-watchers, snowmobiliers, loggers, hunters, nature-lovers, skiers, snowshoe enthusiasts and nearby residents who all have their own ideas about what forest managers should do with the trees.

And what about the endangered species living in the forest? The rare plants? What do you do with the invasive species threatening to overwhelm the animals, insects and vegetation that have lived in the forest for eons?

On top of that, there are diseases, some of them new, among plants and animals. Pollution and climate change also threaten to change or degrade the forest. Errant ATV riders can scar the forest floor. Target-shooters in abandoned forest gravel pits annoy national forest visitors who are seeking peace and quiet.

Managing the national forest isn’t so easy after all, is it?

New rules

Managing the forest rests on the shoulders on the National Forest Service. New federal planning rules for managing national forests across the country are pending. The rules emphasize collaboration with people who use, work or play in the forests, and encourage the use of scientific facts in reaching decisions on how to manage the forests.

The new rules will affect national forests on a varying timetable. For the Green Mountain National Forest.

The forest covers about 400,000 acres in southwestern and central Vermont. It extends from east of Middlebury south and southwestward to near the Massachusetts border. The forest was established in 1932 amid concerns about environmental damage from unregulated logging in much of Vermont’s uplands.

National Forests generally are lands set aside by the federal government as managed areas to preserve the health of what is regarded as key or unusual or valuable forest lands.

The federally guided management update won’t affect anything until at least 2016. But key aspects of the new rules, especially guidelines that emphasize working with parties with interests in the national forests, already are de rigeur in Vermont, said Ethan Ready, a spokesman for the National Forest Service’s Vermont office, which administers the Green Mountain National Forest and the Finger Lakes National Forest in New York.

“We’re getting at what Vermonters figured out a long time ago,” Ready said. “In Vermont, especially, people expect to be heard.”

Collaboration with the people who use the forest isn’t just public relations, either, Ready said. “You end up with a better plan, and it adds to our credibility,” he said.

A visit to just one corner of the Green Mountain National Forest, along a dirt road called Natural Turnpike in Ripton, reveals the complex dance the National Forest Service does with the landscape’s ecology, the changing, fragile state of the wildlife and plants in the forests, and the often-conflicting goals of the people who love the forest so much there’s a danger they could love it to death.

The road originally was built in the 1960s for timbering, but now has vacation houses and a few year-round homes tucked into small yards at the edges of the forest. Logging trucks occasionally rumble by. Usually, in the winter, people come up the road to access snowmobile trails and smaller, separate trails for snowshoing and cross country skiing.

The snow cover was oddly thin in the forest in mid-February. Much of the Green Mountain National Forest is a working landscape, almost as much as a farm might be. The forest around Natural Turnpike Road shows wide-ranging signs of human activity. Despite the lack of snow, there was evidence of half-hearted attempts at snowmobiling and skiing. Footprints in the mud alongside the road, some leading off into the forest, meant hikers have been around. A low rumble off the far end of the road came from a logging operation.

Shortly after Jay Strand of the Forest Service turned his SUV onto the road, he and his companions, including a Burlington Free Press photographer and reporter, encountered Nola Kevra, who was walking near her home with one of her dogs, Orion. She complained about the logging trucks banging and rumbling by on the road.

“It’s made for a very unpleasant winter,” she told Strand, a forest environmental coordinator the U.S. Forest Service.

He was sympathetic, agreed the trucks had to be annoying, but said there was not much that could be done. After the encounter he said that no matter how inclusive the Forest Service tries to be, it sometimes is impossible to make everyone happy.

Strand and Chris Casey, a forest silviculturist with the U.S. Forest Service, said they wanted to highlight Natural Turnpike Road to show the complexity of managing the wildlife in the forest, never mind the humans who traipse through regularly.

Strand parked the SUV behind another vehicle carrying Ready and Casey, near a culvert that allows Sparks Brook to run under Natural Turnpike Road.

The culvert was replaced a few years ago with a novel design called a bottomless arch, Casey said. Instead of speeding through the culvert over metal, water in the brook gurgled and babbled over rocks and gravel on the bottom of the underpass, just as it did in the streambed on either side of the culvert.

The culvert’s design allows trout to move freely along the brook, helping to protect the species, Casey said.

A happy side-effect of bottomless arch culverts is they don’t seem to be as vulnerable to flood damage as standard culverts. While many culverts were destroyed in the flooding brought on by Tropical Storm Irene last August, none of the handful of bottomless arch culverts sustained any serious damage, he said.

To the clearing

Next stop: A large, flat clearing in the forest. A national forest probably shouldn’t be just, well, forest. Loggers removed almost all trees from roughly an acre, except for the few that remained, here and there.

The clearing is not far from a wetland, and the meadow is designed to help a songbird population that depends on both wetlands and open areas to thrive, Casey said. The work on the clearing was unfinished. Sticks and firewood poked out of the snow. That would be cleaned up, and grasses to make woodcocks and other songbirds feel at home would be planted.

The clearing, with its level ground, also is for humans, Casey said. A few people could camp there in the summer as they hiked through, as long as the spot isn’t so overrun that they bother the birds.

The caravan proceeded less than mile to a logging operation further up Natural Turnpike Road. Crews were picking through the forest selecting some trees, and leaving a majority behind. The Forest Service lately has been negotiating logging contracts differently than in past years, a trend that is reflected in the draft rules that will cover all national forests, Casey said.

“Before, we would always package up contracts and sell them to the highest bidder,” Casey said. Now, the Forest Service considers how the loggers would be stewards of the area they are logging.

“They not only give us a proposal as to how to get the logging done, but how the stewardship will be done,” Casey continued. “We award the contract with the best value.”

The Forest Service hires landscape architects to ensure the logging is thin enough so visitors are less likely to notice a gap in the forest from nearby hills.

“We want the timber operation to blend into the scenery,” Casey said.

The last stop on the tour was one in which the Forest Service requested the exact location be withheld. Four places in the world are home to a rare plant called Appalachian Jacobs ladder. One of them is in the Green Mountain National Forest, not far from Natural Turnpike.

One little plant, albeit a precious one, a protected species, creates a lot of fuss. Plastic orange flags guard the wetland where the Jacobs ladder is growing. Three orange slash-marks are on each of a half dozen trees, meant to warn loggers away from the plants. In February, the Jacobs ladder plants don’t look like much, just a few broken, desiccated brown stalks poking a few inches through the crusty layer of snow in the wetland.

As of 2008, there were an estimated 84,000 Jacobs ladder plants in 77 native and two introduced populations in North America, most of them in New York, Maryland, West Virginia, and Vermont, Ready said. That might sound like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s a rare species, he said. Some populations of Applachian Jacobs ladder have disappeared, but thanks to research by the U.S. Forest Service and other entities in Ripton, other populations of the plant have been found elsewhere in Vermont, Ready said.

Perhaps a dozen people or more have to worry about the Appalachian Jacobs ladder — illustrating how complicated things can become. Even snow-plow operators, ditch-diggers and tree trimmers had to be told of the Jacobs ladder. Some of it has spread into the ditches along the road, and everyone must be careful to avoid harming the protected species, Casey said.

Managing people

It seems everybody wants a piece of the Green Mountain National Forest. The loggers are there. The year-round and summer residents live on the edge of it. Hikers, snowmobile enthusiasts, skiers, runners and other sports people infiltrate it. The forest is the subject of uncountable Kodak moments.

The Green Mountain National Forest is one of most populated forests in the country, Ready said. It’s within a day’s drive of 70 million people. With all that potential activity, he said, the Forest Service had better be ready to work with constituents. Ready said it’s hard to say how many people visit the forest, since people are not required to sign in or pay a fee to enter the forest.

The Forest Service receives mostly high marks for at least communicating with people, and following through on suggestions.

“They do a good job. They understand the role of partners and managing the forest and have the forest be a special place, and can have the recreational uses we all enjoy,” said Will Wiquist of the Green Mountain Club. The club administers the Long Trail, which runs through parts of the Green Mountain National Forest.

Wiquist’s words were echoed by others, though sometimes the collaboration’s results don’t work for everybody.

The Green Mountain National Forest has different zones, much like a city will have different zones for residential use, or commercial, or rural. In the National Forest, the 18 zones include areas of heavy human use, such as near the three alpine and seven Nordic ski areas within the forest’s bounds. The forests also has zones meant for little human impact, such as wilderness areas, theoretically free of motorized machines that could disturb wildlife.

“There’s a range of problems historically. The concerns we’ve had include adequate enforcement of trail use, with ATVs and snowmobiles. There are various wilderness areas that are to be free of motorized use,” said Anthony Iarrapino, a clean water and healthy forest advocate for the Conservation Law Foundation.

The Montpelier-based foundation is an environmental advocacy group that lobbies, and sometimes takes legal action, to prevent or mitigate what the organization sees as environmental threats. There have been no major disputes been the CLF and the U.S. Forest Service concerning the Green Mountain National Forest.

Ready, the forest spokesman, said officers patrol near wilderness areas, watching for illegal vehicles. They also receive a big assist from members of the public, who are quick to report violations to the Forest Service or to law enforcement.

Iarrapino said Forest Service personnel sometimes are in a difficult position, given that they are at least in part at the shifting mercy of political winds in Washington.

“It’s very tough,” Iarrapino said. “The reality is, too, that they are a branch of the federal government. The politics and the political outlook of the president in regard to management of public lands very much affects what people on the ground are able to do.”

Plus, there’s the usual bureaucratic shuffling and moving, he added. “Just when you get to working with somebody, they get shipped off to Alaska or Wyoming, or where there’s another national forest,” Iarrapino said.

Then there are people who just don’t like the zoning in a National Forest. Nola Kevra, the woman Strand encountered on Natural Turnpike, said the National Forest is being smothered by too many people, and the Forest Service isn’t doing enough to protect it.

Forest Service personnel might be listening to people, she said, “but I don’t think they’re listening to the forest.”

“I spend every day out in the woods with my dog. The forest doesn’t look happy to me,” Kevra said. She thinks it’s being damaged by pollution, by climate change, by logging, by invasive species.

She hopes the forest outlasts the threats against it. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful spot,” she said. “It’s a glorious spot. Not a day goes by when there’s not something new to see.”